February 2019 Must-Reads

Isn’t it crazy how January was the neverending story and we, basically, blinked through February? We had a lot going on this month including a couple of crazy winter storms, a couple of power outages, launching a new product (see below), and a bug that has had me crawling to my bed all week. It definitely made my stack this month a little smaller than usual, but I promise to make up for it next month.

Did I mention we are heading to Iceland to celebrate my husband’s 40th???

Someone please pinch me because I still don’t believe it myself.

If you have any tips for our travels next month, we are ALL EARS. I am hoping to get in a lot of vacation reading on our flights and between our excursions.

My hope is to offer a shirt for you each year that you can collect as you read these books.

This shirt comes in a women’s cut, unisex, a sweatshirt, and a hoodie. I picked a rainbow of hues that you can choose from as your base.

10% of the proceeds will go to the Little Free Library to help get books in the hands of ALL the people. This shirt is available through March 20th! Your purchase is greatly appreciated and helps us keep our book club free and paying it forward to the reading community! Shop it HERE!

Here are 6 must-read books I tackled in February:

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house for providing an advanced copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!

Queenie is one of the year’s most anticipated novels and I have to say that I enjoyed this story immensely. Described as Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Americanah, I felt it really delivered in sharing about what it would be like to be a Jamaican British woman who is navigating the world of dating today.

Queenie is a 25-year-old woman living in London and straddling two cultures while fitting into neither. After breaking up with her white boyfriend, she begins to seek comfort in all the wrong places and puts herself into terrible situations that don’t, ultimately, validate her self-worth.

Queenie is surrounded by women who do their best to help Queenie overcome her breakup, but she can’t seem to stop chasing after the wrong things. The reader is lead down each cringe-worthy scenario from unexpectedly awful sexual encounters, to discovering that a man who seemed like he was Mr. Right was actually married, to even the embarrassment of having to live with your grandparents because you can’t pay your rent .

Queenie begins the long journey towards healing when she begins to see a counselor and must learn to love herself, even in her brokenness.

I loved this story for a couple of reasons.

One, I think that Carty-Williams really showcases the difficulties of dating today and how many people treat dating sites like meaningless hookups instead of striving to find one’s match. As someone out of the game, I really felt for Queenie and these terrible scenarios she found herself in.

Secondly, I love seeing characters evolve and I think Queenie really grew through this experience and it helped propel our story as she finds love within and through surrounding herself with the right people.

Carty-Williams writes with heartfelt honesty, humor, and with vulnerability. I hope we can follow more of Queenie’s adventures in the future. I highly recommend this one for fans of Insecure. It helped me get my fix until the next season comes!

5 out of 5 Stars

Thank you to the publishing house for providing an advanced copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!

I have to say that, The Forgotten Hours, was this month’s surprise debut that I just could not put down. We all know that I’m a sucker for a good coming-of-age story and this was a compelling mystery that was perfectly timed for the #metoo movement.

At twenty-four, Katie feels like her life is really looking up. She has a great job, a supportive partner, and she is finally in a place where she can put her traumatic past to rest.

You see, a decade earlier, her idyllic summer days with friends came to a shocking conclusion when her best friend accused her father of sexual assault. Katie stood by her father throughout the entire ordeal and his imprisonment. With his release in sight, reporters have been opening up this case, once again, for reinvestigation and Katie is forced to relive this difficult portion of her past.

Told beautifully through reflection of on her friendship during that summer as well as the current state of affairs, Katie must grapple with her own conviction that her father was not guilty of the crime, as she sees her dad now through adult eyes. She also must acknowledge the glaring truth as she reexamines this adolescent summer.

This would be an EXCELLENT book for a book club discussion because it is so beautifully told and because Schumann really builds mystery around this case. I think the biggest takeaway, for me, was how we all begin to see parents are human and flawed, as we get older, and how this new viewpoint can make us question the things in our past.

This story is timely and a promising debut of good things to come from Schumann.

This debut novel shares the haunting story of a young woman’s struggle with anorexia and her struggle to reclaim her life.

Anne Roux was a professional dancer that followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. Upon relocating she faces her own glaring imperfections, failures, and loneliness, and she must find a way to cope. Her disordered eating habits and depression bring her down to a mere eighty-eight pounds and she is forced to seek treatment.

She is admitted to 17 Swann Street, a location where women with life-threatening eating disorders live. This unlikely community of women all must tackle their own individual demons and offer a surprising amount of support to one another as they recognize those demons in each other. Zgheib writes with raw honesty about what it is like to be consumed by this disease. Never glamorized, this really gives an eye-opening account of what it is like when each day is a struggle and when each bite feels like an affliction and loss of control.

People who have never struggled with disordered eating may be able to better understand how hard it is to overcome an eating disorder. If you have ever struggled, you will find pieces of yourself in this story. One can’t help but root for Anne as she struggles to find her way to back to herself and to the man she loves. The poetic writing adds a gorgeously lyrical layer to this surprisingly hopeful story.

4 out of 5 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house for providing a copy of this novel for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!

Looking for a quick escape from reality? Big Little Liesfans will absolutely love Not That I Could Tell. Pour yourself a glass of wine and get to know this cozy neighborhood and all their dirty little secrets.

The story opens with a neighborhood gathering, centered around the neighbor’s new fire pit, a heavy pour of wine, and the opportunity to catch up on what’s been happening around the ‘hood. On a rare kid-free evening, the wine flows and the women begin to loosen their guards and share more intimately about their lives.

By Monday morning though, one of the women has disappeared.

Despite feeling like they all know each other well, none of them can make sense of this disappearance. Kristin has always seemed happy, sociable, career-driven, and has weathered her impending divorce well. When the police come to investigate though, they find her soon-to-be ex-husband at the center of this case and have questions about what was really happening in their home.

Frankly, no one REALLY knows what goes on behind closed doors and, as a reader, you don’t know if Paul warrants sympathy or more scrutiny.

I don’t want to say anymore about the plot on this because half of the fun is finding out just what happened to this neighborhood mom. Strawser fleshes out each character vividly and all of their own emotions and guilt surrounding this woman’s disappearance.

I really enjoyed this one as a great escape, but also appreciated the reminder that many of our relationships are surface ones and just how important it is to build real relationships with the people we call our friends.

I couldn’t put this one down and I doubt you could too.

4 out of 5 Stars

This month’s book club selection was, My Sister the Serial Killer, and our bookworms really seemed to enjoy this pick. I selected it because it was a book that could be read in a day (a modest page count of just 240 pages) and because the plot was so intriguing. Lucky for us, this one will be coming to the big screen and I will be excited to see how they interpret this interesting story into film.

Korede and Ayoola are two sisters that could not be more different from each other. Korede is the eldest and is a hard worker and disciplined. Ayoola, on the other hand, is gorgeous and a serial killer.

As I said, these two couldn’t be more different except that Korede is getting tired of cleaning up after her sister’s messes. Each time she kills someone, Korede must help Ayoola dispose of the body and help with clean-up on the case.

The plot thickens though when Ayoola sets her eyes on the wrong guy. At the hospital, where Korede works, she has been harboring a secret crush on a doctor that she works with. When Ayoola comes to visit Korede at work though, the doctor can’t help but be completely captivated by Ayoola’s beauty and falls head over heels for her.

The problem?

Well, Korede’s broken heart, for one.

More importantly though, his life is now at risk because Ayoola is a sociopath and he just might be her next victim.

It’s hard to pinpoint what genre this unique book falls under, but I read it as dark satire. If you were worried about the title or weren’t on board for the gruesome world of serial killing, I think you will find that this doesn’t lean too darkly into that element and more into the complex relationships of sisters.

Overall, people seemed to enjoy this one a lot, especially for such a sparse book. She tells the story effectively without putting the reader through numerous killings or making them wade through filler to get to the meat of the story. Braithwaite also builds enough of a backstory for Ayoola that you understand where she’s coming from, even if you don’t always know where she’s going.

Charlotte’s wealthy parents commit her beloved sister Phoebe to the infamous Goldengrove Asylum, and Charlotte just knows that there is more to the story than what her parents have revealed to her. In an effort to save her sister, she fakes an attempted suicide and surrenders her real identity, as a privileged young woman, to become a nameless inmate. Within the asylum Charlotte is now known only as Woman 99.

The majority of our story is Charlotte trying to befriend people who can get her a step closer to her sister and to try to figure out a way that she can actually get to her within this asylum. She discovers that many of these women aren’t insane, but merely inconvenient- and they are able to become some of her most powerful allies as she discovers just why Phoebe has been locked away.

Macallister weaves a rich historical tapestry, but this is a slow burn at 368 pages. The first half felt very slow, but if you can hang with it, Macallister weaves a great mystery and has definitely done her research on what women would have been committed for, in this time period.

Overall, she weaves a believable and satisfying ending that I think any reader would appreciate. Once you read through the Q&A with Greer, you really discover what an undertaking the research was to really bring this fictional asylum to life. While pacing was an issue for me, I appreciate the work that went into creating this beautiful sister story.